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Registers of African-Derived Lexicon in Uruguay: Etymologies, Demography and Semantic Change

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Registers of African-Derived Lexicon in Uruguay: Etymologies, Demography and Semantic Change ZrP 2019; 135(1): 223–255 Laura Álvarez López / Magdalena Coll Registers of African-derived lexicon in Uruguay: etymologies, demography and semantic change https://doi.org/10.1515/zrp-2019-0006 Abstract: The present paper deals with 82 words of possible African origin registered in Uruguay by Ildefonso Pereda Valdés and Rolando Laguarda Trías between 1937 and 1965. Many of the lexical items were probably introduced by enslaved Africans brought to the region during the 18th and 19th centuries. Evidence shows that most of the words are apparently shared with varieties of Spanish outside the Rio de la Plata region, and most of them also appear in neighboring Argentina and Brazil. Furthermore, the African-derived lexicon is often used to denominate the ‘other’ with respect to people and social behaviors, and most of these loanwords are nouns with possible origins in Bantu languages spoken in West-Central Africa, which corresponds to the available demographic data. Keywords: africanisms, lexicon, Spanish, Bantu languages, Uruguay, Laguarda Trías, Pereda Valdés 1 Introduction The present paper deals with 82 words of possible African origin that characterize the variety of Spanish used in Uruguay. Our work is based on two written sources, and we do not focus on a specific Afro-Hispanic variety, but rather deal with loanwords that have been registered and that may or may not be still in use today. According to Thomason’s borrowing scale (2001, 69), these loanwords appear to be the result of casual contact between speakers of African languages and Correspondence address: Prof. Dr. Laura Álvarez López, Stockholms universitet, Romanska och klassika institutionen, Universitetsvägen 10 B, plan 5, SE-10691 Stockholm, E-Mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Magdalena Coll, Universidad de la República de Uruguay, Departamento de Psico y Sociolingüística, Magallanes 1577, UR-11200 Montevideo, E-Mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2019 Laura Álvarez López and Magdalena Coll, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/28/19 7:53 AM 224 Laura Álvarez López / Magdalena Coll Spanish, meaning that it was not necessary for the borrowers to have been fluent in the possible African source languages. We believe that the borrowers were most likely speakers of Spanish in a colonial society that received enslaved Africans during the 18th and 19th centuries. Winford (2005) defines this type of borrowing as ‘borrowing under recipient language agentivity’. As far as we know, these words have not been studied currently by sociolinguists or anthropologists, nor have linguists studied their vitality using modern analytical tools. In spite of the lack of sources regarding the speech of Africans and their descendants in Uruguay, we do refer to lexicographical works that enable us to get closer to our object of study. 1.1 Word lists published by Laguarda Trías (1969) and Pereda Valdés (1937; 1965) Two pioneering Uruguayan authors, Ildefonso Pereda Valdés (1937; 1965)1 and Rolando Laguarda Trías (1969), studied the lexical contribution of Africans and their descendants in the Spanish of the Rio de la Plata in the 20th century. In their publications, they compiled lists of supposed African-derived vocabulary in Uruguay that also served as the point of departure for the volume edited by Álvarez López/Coll (2012). Apart from these works, the African-derived lexicon in Uruguay, which is the topic of this article, has not generated greater interest among linguists. The two authors who produced the original lists, published in Montevideo, had very different backgrounds. Pereda Valdés made a fundamental contribution to documentary and historical sources regarding Africans and their descendants in the Rio de la Plata region, and his vocabularies serve as the basis for the work of Rolando Laguarda Trías (1969) on what he calls afronegrismos (‘Afronegrisms’) in the same region. These research materials are the starting point of our discussion on the African contribution to Uruguayan Spanish. Our corpus consists of the mentioned word stock. The first challenge facing this study is that the two authors who registered the words did not explain how 1 In the list from 1965, Pereda Valdés (1965) refers to a song collected in 1929 in which the word cachumba appears, but he does not mention the very short vocabulary that he published as an appendix to the poems and songs compiled in Raza Negra (Pereda Valdés 1929). Most of the words included in that vocabulary are not recognized as being used in the Rio de la Plata region, nor attested in other sources, and were therefore not discussed in the present study: ksouriens, djermas de iamey, kouili kouta, serki, kolo, kamembú, ganza, boumba, zongo, bondo, bambili, yalounga, ounga, bangassou, kassaku, boula matai, olelé, goudougoudou, tick-tick, makers, tutús, mangbetú, mousoungou, eveyday, ninghe, ninghe, ninghe, mandinga, ronda catonga, macumba. Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/28/19 7:53 AM Registers of African-derived lexicon in Uruguay 225 they collected them or how they selected which lexical items to include on their lists. Thus, it is possible that some terms appear on the lists despite not having actually been used in the Rio de la Plata region. The authors may also have found lexical items in the written sources from Argentina and Brazil that they cite and included them in their lists for reasons that we ignore. 1.2 Aims of the study Our first aim is to confirm the reliability of our corpus by corroborating that the included words existed, and that they were present in the region, as well as to verify their meanings. We also intend to discuss whether these words only appear in Uruguayan Spanish, or if they are shared with dialectal varieties of Spanish apart from those spoken in the Rio de la Plata region. For these purposes, various dictionaries and other available sources that include African-derived lexemes used in Uruguay, as well as in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil, are consulted. In order to deepen our understanding of the analyzed materials, we also consult and discuss written sources cited by Pereda Valdés (1937; 1965) and Laguarda Trías (1969). By doing so, we are able to identify semantic changes from a diachronic perspective and to shed light on different (sometimes new) meanings of the lexical items. The second aim of our study is to identify possible etyma for each word, and to systematize the distribution of African-derived lexemes in word classes and semantic fields according to the various meanings of each of the words in Uruguayan Spanish. We will turn to dictionaries of relevant African languages in order to verify their possible etymologies. Finally, we will discuss the relation between the identified etymologies and the demographic data available on the origins of the slave population in this area and present conclusions that may be drawn about the sociocultural context from the semantic and etymological ana- lyses. In order to achieve our aims, after this introduction, we will briefly present the written sources used by Laguarda Trías and Pereda Valdés in section 2, before we proceed, in section 3, to an overview of the demographic and linguistic profile of the African population in Uruguay in the 19th century. In section 4, we will present the methodology for the lexical study, and our analysis and discussion of the findings is presented in section 5. The paper closes with some final remarks. Finally, our corpus of 82 words with glosses and possible African etyma is presented as an Appendix. Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/28/19 7:53 AM 226 Laura Álvarez López / Magdalena Coll 2 Sources for the word lists of Laguarda Trías and Pereda Valdés Ildefonso Pereda Valdés (1899–1996), author of the first primary source, was a lawyer who was known for his poetry and essays. His lexicographic work may be questioned, but it represents a very early time in the region and serves as an unparalleled reference for anyone interested in the subject.2 In 1937, Pereda Valdés published Los pueblos negros del Uruguay y la influencia africana en el habla rioplatense (The Black People of Uruguay and the African influence in the speech of the Rio de la Plata region), which contains a list of words of African origin used in the Rio de la Plata region. In 1965, the author provides a revised version of this vocabulary in a publication that includes other essays on the social and political situation of African descendants in Uruguay. The terms presented in these two publications do not coincide exactly: for example, bunda, catanga and zambomba appear in 1937 but not in 1965, and benguela, luandas and minas appear in the latter work but not in the former. In any case, it should be noted that Pereda Valdés based his comments on the origins of the words on the work of the Brazilian essayist Renato Mendonça (1973 [1933]), who focused on the “African element” in Portuguese, as well as on the vocabulary of Daniel Granada (1957 [1889]),3 a pioneering lexicographic work on the Spanish of the Río de la Plata. However, none of these authors referred to dictionaries of African languages in their work. Laguarda Trías (1902–1998), the second author of concern to us in this paper, was a multifaceted researcher who excelled in areas as diverse as geography, historical cartography, military history, lexicography and etymology. He had received a military education and had published several works, among which we emphasize his contribution to what he calls afronegrismos (‘Afronegrisms’) in the Rio de la Plata. In his article from 1969, he classifies the words into “false Afronegrismos”, “negrismos”, “authentic Afronegrismos” and “voices that do not have African origin but that were brought from Africa by black slaves and introduced thanks to them, in the speech of the River Plate” (Laguarda Trías 1969, 2 According to Brazilian anthropologist Paulo de Carvalho Neto, the work of Pereda Valdés has shortcomings.
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